A mindset for creating art

S

Now this person is an illustrator but she could be a fine artist. couldn’t she?

The line that divides these two is thin. Both illustrators and fine artists make art, so one can switch over, and indeed, many fine artists have illustrated for a living, and there are illustrators who have quit to paint full-time. It’s a thin line.

The substance of that line is mindset, and it is not unusual for artists to spend a lifetime trying to get across to the other side.

So this person, our illustrator, studied commercial art, and the school taught her to create art that is made-to-order. As an Intern, she learnt how to make sense of a client brief and figure out the questions she must ask to create art that fits the brief. When she turned professional, she learnt to build visible checkpoints into her workflow, so each stage of the illustration is made explicit–because some clients do not realise that it is almost impossible to correct an artwork once it is complete.

Over the course of many years, this process begins to instill in our illustrator a certain mindset. She now believes that all significant artwork must begin with a plan. It may not be an elaborate plan. Often it is a scribble in a sketchbook, a thumbnail. Sometimes, not even that–just an unrecorded thought. Nevertheless, it is a plan. A top down way of creating art.

The fine artist on the other hand starts with a bottom-up process. She experiments, making marks on paper or canvas, or in clay or on wood and she observes how it responds to her and importantly she observes how she is reacting to it¹. This process can take hours or days, even weeks and years, and the end result of all this experimentation are patterns.

Patterns that repeat when a medium responds to a technique or when an unintended spillage provokes a story. Patterns also form inside oneself. Changes in the way she thinks. Sensations and feelings that the process or the output evokes.

Last month, during the Blr Hubba, a popular art and culture event in Bengaluru, I observed two artists create an art installation at the Freedom Park. Valsan Koorma Kolleri and his associate Vishnu had just unloaded the material that would be the medium for the installation. Beams of thick, elephant bamboo, red earth, gunny sacks and branches and twigs. Lots of branches and twigs.

“What will you make?” I asked Vishnu.

“I don’t know. We’ll see where it goes.” Vishnu told me.

He showed me some sketches, but they were not development sketches of the sort an illustrator would create prior to starting a project. These were almost mood captures. A mish-mash of drawings with annotated text and images whose function was to remind the artist of a certain sensation that strikes those who live in verdant nature of Kerala.

I watched the installation come together, over a couple of weeks. The end result was a diorama of what you may run into in a forest. The scene reminded me of toppled trees, resting on each other, covered in mud, as though termites had taken over them. A massive pod lay among them, as though a giant weaver bird had decided to build a nest from twigs and branches and the detritus that covers a forest floor. The installation was also synthetic, with a man-made quality, which added to the strangeness of it .

Arriving at the final artwork in this way is counter intuitive. In the deterministic world we live in, things revolve around us. We are persisting selves who ensure the outcomes we intend. We make the tools.

It takes time for it to dawn on us that tools, equally, make us.

Notes